Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett: review

Peter Ingham revels in Terry Pratchett's 37th Discworld novel, Unseen
Academicals, in which the wizards must start a football team

When Terry Pratchett announced that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, fans of his Discworld novels must have wondered if that spelt the end of the series. Well, not yet, as the arrival of Unseen Academicals proves. This is the 37th in a body of work so vast that it has spawned its own concordance, yet the quality remains as high as ever and the laughs as plentiful.

Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett

The wizards at Unseen University risk losing a valuable bequest – the one that funds their lavish dinners – unless they can field a football team. Regular readers will know that to wizards smoking is a vocation and their idea of healthy exercise is lifting a fork, but they set to, with the inevitable bickering.

Football, as practised in the city of Ankh Morpork, is the sort of all-in, no-holds-barred mass punch-up that draws little distinction between spectators (“the Shove”) and players and which can still be found in the more rustic corners of Britain. Luckily, the city’s tyrant, Lord Vetinari, has decided to tame the anarchy, and when an ancient set of rules turns up by suspicious coincidence, the wizards are instructed to use these as the basis of a modern version of the game (with no magic).

Meanwhile, below stairs, we meet Glenda, head of the Night Kitchen; her beautiful but dim friend Juliet; Trev, the son of a famous footballer who has forsworn the game; and Nutt, an overeducated goblin whose past is a mystery.

It is Nutt’s journey of self-discovery that is the spine of the narrative, but football and the wizards provide most of the fun.

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You can’t call what Pratchett does satire – it’s far too good-natured for that – but he has a satirist’s instinct for the absurd and a cartoonist’s eye for the telling detail.

Like all the Discworld novels, Unseen Academicals rewards a second reading. As ever it is peppered with allusions, from Keats to the Lewinsky affair, but, like Wodehouse, Pratchett wears his learning lightly and the pleasure of rereading is in teasing them out.